Bug 801524

Summary: [RFE] Add syntactic sugar to enable guest agent communication
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Reporter: Dave Allan <dallan>
Component: libvirtAssignee: Libvirt Maintainers <libvirt-maint>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: Virtualization Bugs <virt-bugs>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 6.4CC: acathrow, ajia, berrange, dyuan, mzhan, rwu, whuang
Target Milestone: rcKeywords: FutureFeature
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Enhancement
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Last Closed: 2012-03-08 20:09:04 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:

Description Dave Allan 2012-03-08 18:08:57 UTC
Currently a user of the qemu guest agent must manually configure a virtio-serial communication channel to enable libvirt to talk to the agent.  IMO it would make things easier on users to create a tag in the domain XML like <enable-agent/> or similar to set up the channel automatically.

Comment 2 Daniel Berrangé 2012-03-08 18:25:54 UTC
The way we currently configure virtio serial devices is not the way it will be done long term. Currently libvirt manages comms with the guest agent, so we must specify a full set of config parameters for a UNIX socket backend. In the future QEMU will manage comms, and so the setup will be more like the spice agent config.

Either way, I don't think we should be adding syntactic sugar to the XML in this way. If ease of use if the desire, then you've already lost big time, by being near the XML, and there are many many other areas of libvirt XML that are just as verbose as agent config is, without syntactic sugar.

The focus should be on making virt-manager/virt-install do the right thing, for usability, and documenting the fine details for libvirt XML, not sugaring the XML schema.

Comment 3 Dave Allan 2012-03-08 20:09:04 UTC
Ok, I'll buy that.